Visit Bibliomania (see Resources), a website that has thousands of ebooks, poems, short stories and more available to readers for free. The fiction list on Bibliomania is extensive, from "Anna Karenina" to "Wuthering Heights." You can search for books on Bibliomania by genre and author, and read fiction by authors such as James Joyce, Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe. Bibliomania adds new books every month, and the site encourages participation with message boards, author articles and interviews.
Go to Project Gutenberg (see Resources), which bills itself as "the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks." Project Gutenberg has more than 25,000 free books (as of 2010) in its catalog, including all of Shakespeare's works. Its Top 100 downloaded books list contains "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen, "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens, "The Iliad" by Homer and "Dracula" by Bram Stoker. When you download a free book from Project Gutenberg, you will get a "zip" file that must be unzipped before you can read the text. You can also download Plucker software, which allows you to read books directly on your PDA or smartphone.
Check out the Online Books Page (see Resources) maintained by the University of Pennsylvania, which has more than 30,000 free ebooks available to the public. Online Books has a search tool that takes you to other sites, most of which are maintained by libraries around the world. Once there, you will have the option of downloading the book as a text file, a PDF file or a flip book.
Check out Google Books, where you can search directly for free books or browse through Google's extensive collection of books. Books that are in the public domain are free to download as a PDF copy. Google Books is also handy for reference, with relevant information about books available, including reviews, Web reference sites, maps and more. You can also click on "buy this book" or "borrow this book" to be taken to websites for bookstores and lending libraries.
Look for the variety of collaborative book sites proliferating the Web these days, especially if you're looking for something new to read. These sites include: Protagonize, a fiction story writing community; and WEBooks, a collaborative story writing site whose first novel, "Pandora," is a cross-cultural love story selling for $5.99, as of 2010 (see Resources).